management

Between 2008 and 2010, we hired a multinational consulting firm to implement an intensive management intervention in Indian textile weaving plants. Both treatment and control firms received a one-month diagnostic, and then treatment firms received four months of intervention. We found (ungated) that poorly managed firms could have their management substantially improved, and that this improvement resulted in a reduction in quality defects, less excess inventory, and an improvement in productivity.

Should we expect this improvement in management to last? One view is the “Toyota way”, with systems put in place for measuring and monitoring operations and quality launch a continuous cycle of improvement. But an alternative is that of entropy, or a gradual decline back into disorder – one estimate by a prominent consulting firm is that two-thirds of transformation initiatives ultimately fail. In a new working paper, Nick Bloom, Aprajit Mahajan, John Roberts and I examine what happened to the firms in our Indian management experiment over the longer-term.

This is the twelfth in this years' job market series.Family firms are the most prevalent type of firm in the world. This is especially true in emerging economies, where family firms account for over half of medium-sized firms in the manufacturing sector. In particular, dynastic family firms – that is, where the founding family owns a controlling share and have appointed a second-generation (or later) family member as the CEO – account for a quarter of these firms. Since supporting such firms as the “backbone of the economy” is very politically popular (as this skilfully edited video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver shows), it is crucial to understand more about these firms. More specifically, we need to understand how they operate and what their impact is on the economy and labour markets. Although there is mixed evidence on whether family ownership is a good thing, the weight of the evidence is that dynastic family CEOs are usually bad news for productivity. But why is that the case?

Chris Woodruff and I have a recent working paper in which we look at the importance of business practices for small firms in developing countries, using surveys administered to over 20,000 small firms in Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka.